Hatsumi and Monobanda hold world premiere of SoulPaint at SXSW 2024 – a VR body-mapping project allowing participants to express emotions through healing art

Hatsumi and Monobanda have held the world premiere of its SoulPaint VR project at South by Southwest (SXSW), a festival celebrating technology, film, and more held in Austin, Texas March 8 to 16, 2024. The project explores the intersection of technology, medicine, and art in self-expression and healing. The twenty minute VR experience allowed participants to explore their lived experiences and emotions through body mapping, or drawing on a body portrait as a form of arts therapy.

Body mapping has been used as a method to communicate experiences and perceptions of one’s body in medicine and research as far back as 1992 and has grown in popularity during the past decade. It is an emerging approach to symbolically express the self, narrate personal stories, and explore relationships and emotions while countering the effects of colonization on healthcare, research, and storytelling.

An advantage is the ability for participants to communicate more clearly than vocalization and bypass colonial pressures to be polyvocal, or self-censored. This is because art and music are more fundamental to human existence than the ability to articulate well, and this allows marginalized people to convey their lived experiences expressively without having to reach for the dictionary.

SoulPaint allowed participants to paint over virtual representations of themselves while wearing Meta Quest VR headsets and listening to narration by actress Rosario Dawson. Users could explore their feelings and being in a deeper way than conventional body mapping because they were interacting with their own bodies in real-time. 

The producers were able to gain valuable feedback for refining future versions of SoulPaint as they continue to explore the ability of VR body mapping to create better lives, similar to how music can create positive mental changes. 

The project has been funded by Unity for Humanity and the StoryFutures National Centre for Immersive Storytelling with money provided by UK Research & Innovation. Readers interested in utilizing art to heal can read about it in books (like this or this for researchers at Amazon) or develop their own VR healing apps (with a Meta Quest headset, Unity3D, and book on Unity programming at Amazon).